Akamai interview process (2026)
Round-by-round breakdown of the Akamai software engineering interview across 3 levels and 13 rounds: what each round covers, what interviewers evaluate, sample questions, and preparation tips.
Software Engineer I (0-2 yrs)
Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-6 weeks
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Round 0: HackerRank Online Assessment
Assessment · ~60 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Focus: Arrays, strings, dynamic programming, aptitude and CS-fundamentals MCQs
Timed HackerRank test. A recent Bengaluru report describes ~10 questions in 1 hour: 2 coding problems (array manipulation and a keypad letter-to-digit DP problem) plus ~8 aptitude/CS MCQs. Other reports mention 2-3 DSA problems of medium difficulty. Partial scores on coding count, so bank the easy MCQs fast and leave most of the hour for the coding pair.
What they evaluate: Speed and accuracy on easy-medium DSA under time pressure; basic CS/aptitude coverage. This is a hard filter — only top scorers get interview slots.
Sample question: A message was encoded by mapping A=1 ... Z=26 and concatenating the digits (so "226" could be "BZ", "VF" or "BBF"). Given the digit string, count how many distinct letter decodings exist.
Tips: Practice 1-D DP (decode ways, climbing stairs, house robber) and array two-pointer patterns. Do a couple of timed HackerRank mocks — the MCQ+coding mix punishes slow starts.
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Round 1: Technical Interview (DSA + web/networking basics)
Phone · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Focus: DSA on shared editor, HTTP methods, HTTPS/hashing basics, HTML/CSS, resume projects
Virtual round with senior engineers, usually on HackerRank CodePair. You solve 1-2 DSA problems (array increment/pattern problems are reported), then the interviewer pivots to fundamentals tied to Akamai's CDN/edge domain: HTTP methods and idempotency, what HTTPS/TLS adds, hashing, and for web-facing teams some HTML/CSS. Expect a walkthrough of one resume project in depth.
What they evaluate: Clean working code with edge cases, plus whether you actually understand how the web works — Akamai is a CDN company, so shaky HTTP/DNS answers stand out badly.
Sample question: Find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters. Follow-up discussion: which HTTP methods are idempotent, and why does idempotency matter when a proxy or CDN edge retries a request?
Tips: Revisit CS-fundamentals before this round: TCP vs UDP, the TLS handshake at a high level, what a CDN caches and why. Saying "I don't know but here's how I'd reason" beats bluffing on protocol questions.
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Round 2: Managerial Round
Behavioral · ~45 min · difficulty 2/5
Focus: Projects, teamwork scenarios, problem-solving approach, basic security awareness
Scenario-based discussion with an engineering manager: how you handled deadlines and conflicts in projects, your favourite project end to end, and light technical probes — reports mention security basics like cross-site scripting and SQL injection coming up for web-security teams.
What they evaluate: Ownership, communication, and whether your project stories hold up under follow-up questions.
Tips: Pick 2-3 projects you can defend to arbitrary depth. For Akamai, being able to relate a project to performance, caching or security earns easy credibility.
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Round 3: HR Round
Behavioral · ~30 min
Focus: Background, motivation, relocation to Bengaluru, compensation expectations
Standard closing chat: background, why Akamai, hobbies, notice period and comp expectations. Akamai's India engineering is centred in Bengaluru, so location flexibility comes up here.
What they evaluate: Culture fit and logistics; rarely eliminatory if earlier rounds went well.
Tips: Have a crisp "why Akamai" ready — CDN/edge scale (a large share of web traffic rides their network) is an easy, genuine angle.
Software Engineer II (2-5 yrs)
Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-8 weeks
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Round 0: Recruiter Screen
Phone · ~20-30 min
Focus: Experience walkthrough, team/product fit, notice period, logistics
Short call with an Akamai recruiter or the team lead: current role, tech stack, why you are switching, and which team (delivery, security, edge platform, enterprise tools) the req belongs to. Glassdoor reports ~1 week to 3 weeks end-to-end after this call, so timelines are quick once you are in the loop.
What they evaluate: Baseline fit and seriousness; sets up which flavour of technical loop you get (backend, web, networking-heavy).
Tips: Ask which team and product the role is for — Akamai loops vary a lot between security, delivery and platform teams, and the answer tells you what to prep.
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Round 1: Online Assessment (2-3 DSA problems)
Assessment · ~90 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Focus: Medium-hard DSA: arrays, hashing, intervals, DP
Timed coding test (HackerRank) with 2-3 DSA problems of medium to high difficulty. A 2025 offer-holder describes this as the entry gate before 2-3 technical interviews. Problems lean classic LeetCode-medium rather than contest-hard.
What they evaluate: Whether your raw problem-solving is worth 3-4 hours of interviewer time. Clean passes on all test cases matter; partial credit exists but full solves get the callbacks.
Sample question: You are given request logs as (start_ts, end_ts) pairs for connections through an edge server. Return the maximum number of connections that were open simultaneously.
Tips: Sweep-line/heap patterns (meeting rooms, max overlapping intervals) and graph/DP mediums cover most reported OA questions. Do it on a desktop with a stable connection — retakes are not offered.
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Round 2: Technical Interview 1 (DSA deep dive)
Phone · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Focus: Trees, graphs, dynamic programming, complexity analysis
First of 2-3 live technical rounds, 45-60 minutes each, focused squarely on core DSA. Trees, graphs and DP are the reported staples; lowest common ancestor in a binary tree is a specifically reported question. You code in a shared editor and are expected to dry-run your solution.
What they evaluate: Correctness first, then optimisation: they push on complexity and follow-up variants (what if the tree is huge, what if queries repeat) rather than obscure tricks.
Sample question: Given a rooted tree as (parent, child) edges and two nodes u and v, find their lowest common ancestor. Follow-up: how would you answer many LCA queries efficiently?
Tips: For the follow-up, know binary lifting exists and can answer LCA in O(log n) per query after O(n log n) preprocessing — naming the technique and its trade-off is usually enough.
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Round 3: Technical Interview 2 (DSA + networking/SQL)
Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Focus: DSA, HTTP/HTTPS, TCP handshake, DNS resolution, CDN caching, SQL joins/aggregation
Second technical round mixes another DSA problem with Akamai's signature fundamentals: candidates report SQL questions (2 DSA + 1 SQL in one loop) and networking depth — HTTP vs HTTPS, cryptography/hashing, TCP/TLS handshakes, DNS resolution and how a CDN decides cache hit vs miss. Depth varies by team; security and delivery teams push hardest here.
What they evaluate: Whether you understand the systems Akamai actually runs: request lifecycle through DNS -> TCP -> TLS -> cache, plus practical SQL. This round separates LeetCode-only candidates from engineers.
Sample question: Walk through everything that happens when a browser fetches an image served via a CDN: DNS resolution, TCP and TLS handshakes, edge cache hit vs miss and revalidation. Then write a SQL query returning the top 5 customers by total bytes served from a requests(customer_id, bytes) table.
Tips: Rewatch a "what happens when you type a URL" deep dive and be precise: SYN/SYN-ACK/ACK, SNI in the TLS hello, Cache-Control/ETag semantics. Practise GROUP BY + ORDER BY + LIMIT SQL patterns.
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Round 4: Managerial / Behavioral Round
Behavioral · ~45-60 min · difficulty 2/5
Focus: Past projects, conflict and delivery stories, light technical problem-solving
Closing round with the hiring manager combining behavioral questions with technical discussion of your past projects — design decisions you made, trade-offs, production issues you debugged. Offer discussion follows quickly after this; the whole India loop averages about a week once interviews start.
What they evaluate: Depth of ownership on your resume, collaboration style, and whether your seniority matches the SWE II bar.
Tips: Prepare one production-incident story and one design-trade-off story with concrete numbers (latency, traffic, cost). Managers here probe the "why" behind every decision.
Senior Software Engineer
Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~3-5 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-8 weeks
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Round 0: Recruiter / Hiring Manager Screen
Phone · ~30 min
Focus: Experience summary, team context, expectations for the senior loop
Intro call covering your architecture-level experience and the team's charter. A January 2025 Bengaluru senior candidate describes the loop that follows as three strictly sequential elimination rounds — fail one and the process stops — so treat every round as a gate.
What they evaluate: Seniority calibration: they are deciding whether to run you through the senior loop or downlevel the conversation.
Tips: State your level expectations plainly here. If you want Senior, anchor your intro around systems you owned end to end, not features you contributed to.
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Round 1: Problem-Solving Round (HackerRank IDE)
Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Focus: Matrix/graph traversal, BFS/DFS, clean production-quality code
Live coding in the HackerRank IDE with a senior engineer. A reported question: given an m x n matrix of '0' and '_', flip every region of '_' that is fully surrounded by '0' into '0' (the classic surrounded-regions problem). Expect to run your code against real test cases, not just talk through it.
What they evaluate: Working, runnable code under observation. Seniors are also judged on structure: helper functions, naming, and handling the border cases without prompting.
Sample question: Given an m x n grid containing only '0' and '_', produce the grid where every region of '_' cells completely surrounded by '0' (not touching the border) is converted to '0'.
Tips: The trick is inverting the problem: BFS/DFS from border cells to mark unsurrounded regions, then flip the rest. Say that plan out loud before coding — the insight is most of the evaluation.
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Round 2: System Design + Code Quality
System_design · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round
Focus: HLD for a consumer-scale service, API design, caching, coding standards and review practices
Design round doubling as a coding-standards discussion. The reported prompt: design a food aggregator service (catalog, ordering, delivery tracking) — a generic HLD, but interviewers steer into Akamai-adjacent territory: caching layers, CDN offload, TLS termination, and how you would keep p99 latency low at India traffic scale. They also probe how you enforce quality: reviews, testing strategy, API versioning.
What they evaluate: Structured decomposition (requirements -> APIs -> data model -> scale), realistic capacity estimates, and senior-level opinions on caching and consistency trade-offs.
Sample question: Design a food aggregator service like Swiggy/Zomato: restaurant catalog with search, cart and order placement, live delivery tracking. Discuss where a CDN and edge caching fit, and how you keep the catalog read path fast during dinner-peak load.
Tips: Lead with read-path caching — this is Akamai, so knowing what is cacheable (static catalog, images) vs not (cart, live tracking) and TTL/invalidation strategy is the highest-signal card you can play.
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Round 3: Final Round (technical recap + behavioral)
Behavioral · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5
Focus: Follow-ups from earlier rounds, team traits, code-review philosophy, leadership stories
Closing round that blends technical follow-up questions from the earlier rounds with behavioral ones — reported topics include the traits of an ideal team and how you approach code reviews. Be ready to re-derive or extend answers you gave earlier; consistency is being checked.
What they evaluate: Senior behaviours: mentoring, disagreement handling, raising the bar in reviews — plus whether your technical answers survive a second pass.
Tips: One caution from candidate reports: post-loop communication can be slow or absent, so follow up proactively with the recruiter and keep other pipelines warm.
Other companies' interview processes
Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.